


the truth is a cave

by misandrywitch



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alien Abduction, Alternate Universe - X-Files Fusion, Alternative Universe - FBI, FBI agents baking pies?, Supernatural Elements, The X Files - Freeform, The X Files Pilot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 01:25:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5848561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'll believe in anything until I have a reason not to," Jack says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the truth is a cave

**Author's Note:**

> create the incredibly specific niche content you want to see in the world. 
> 
> this follows the plot of the pilot of txf relatively closely, but i don't spend a whole lot of time explaining it so you probably want to have seen it at least once to follow along. there are too many damned dead teenagers in that episode, i gave up trying to make it coherent hahahahaha
> 
> huge thanks to my darling codie because this whole thing wouldn't exist without her good ideas & cleverness & just general wonderful presence. jack "ive seen some shit and nothing surprises me and ghosts are real but its whatever" zimmermann. eric 'everyone we interrogate implicitly trusts me because i make them pie' bittle. i love you.
> 
> also thanks to cait, for just being cait, but also because i literally bullied them into watching the pilot of txf & then proceeded to only talk about this au. bro goals. don't become friends with me.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -- Carl Sagan

 

 

 

 

There are things that he knows, and he repeats them sometimes when he isn’t sure of anything else, because the older he gets the less sure he is that he’s really sure about anything. Water is wet. Gravity is the center of all things. Ice hockey is the greatest sport known to man, and apple pie is the best permutation of baked fruit and dough and sugar. The galaxy is constantly expanding, distant planets and systems nobody else has ever seen moving out and away in all directions all the time, and the space between them is filled with huge incandescent balls of gas, and nobody knows for sure. Nobody knows for sure. The Andromeda galaxy is moving towards the Milky Way and will collide with it in about 4 billion years, give or take. He isn’t a physicist, and his working knowledge of those things is rudimentary, driven by pure curiosity and his own stubborn desire to understand what _might be_ and file it into what _is._

Physics can teach you a lot about the gravitational pull of planets, of gas giants, the movements of asteroids and the equilibrium of the universe. Technically, he’s a psychologist, and because of that maybe he should have a better understanding of the gravitational power of two people who enter each others’ orbits, but he’s never been much for metaphor, despite what anyone may think.

The earth is bombarded by over a hundred tons of space dust every day. About once a year, an asteroid the size of a car collides with the atmosphere and burns up before reaching the surface, a molten red-hot fireball. Every two thousand years or so, a meteor the size of a football field forces its way through the atmosphere and his the planet, leaving wreckage behind. Those things are measurable, explainable.

Neither physics or psychology can explain what it might mean if they aren’t just asteroids.

He’s a psychologist, so he knows a thing or two about the worst things people can do, can say, can feel. He knows firsthand how easy it is to let those things win out. Nobody would describe him as an optimist.

But he’s also a believer, and because of that maybe he should understand that things aren’t always the way they seem and that anything, even an asteroid, even a handshake, can be the start of something else.

 

 

-

 

 

The first thing Eric notices is the man smoking a cigarette in the corner of Section Chief Blevins’ office. Nobody offers his name or any explanation for why he’s there, and in his two years in the F.B.I. Eric has learned that sometimes questions are better off not asked.

Everyone in the room is looking at him in a way that seems to imply something more than a simple change in assignment, but Eric doesn’t ask about that either. Blevins asks him how he wound up in the F.B.I., and another man who’s accent pins him as hailing from somewhere south of the Mason Dixon line asks after his father and the team’s record, and then Blevins asks him a question Eric doesn’t expect, and one he doesn’t know how to answer.

“Are you familiar with an agent named Jack Zimmermann?”

Eric’s somewhat faulty sense of self preservation demands that he laugh, and he does, a little. Isn’t everyone? “Sure am, sir,” he says, not sure where this is going.

“How so?”

“Uh,” Eric falters. “Hearsay. Studied at Oxford, didn’t he? I believe he wrote a monograph on serial killers that that helped track down Monty Props in 1988. Folks say he’s the best criminal profiler in the violent crimes division. He’s a bit of a legend, in the Academy.”

He smiles at the man with the cigarette, who does not smile back, and Eric feels very strongly that he’s two steps behind in this conversation.

Blevins coughs. “What I will tell you is that Agent Zimmermann has developed a consuming devotion to an unassigned project outside the Bureau mainstream. Are you familiar with the so-called X Files?”

Eric does his best to reel in his surprise. It’s not something he’s very good at, terrible poker face, but he takes a deep breath and comes up with the most noncommittal answer he can muster.

“I believe they have something to do with unexplained phenomena,” he says.

Across the desk, Blevins nods. “More or less,” he says, and Eric can tell that there’s something he isn’t saying. “The reason you’re here, Agent Bittle, is we want you to assist Zimmermann on these X Files. You will write field reports on your activities, along with your observations on the validity of the work.”

Eric stares at him, scrambles to come up with a response, to put two and two together. “Am I to understand that you want me to-- to-- debunk the X Files project, sir?” Two steps behind? More like two miles.

“Agent Bittle,” Blevins says, “I’ve heard a great deal of praise for the practicality and enthusiasm of your work. You’ll want to contact Agent Zimmermann shortly. We look forward to seeing your reports.”

The man with the cigarette stubs it out, and Eric leaves the room, struck with the impression that something significant has happened, though he has no way to tell what it is. He wonders what he’s done wrong, and that thought fills his whole body and traps him there in the hallway outside of Blevins’ office.

It’s hard not to be familiar with Agent Zimmermann, who is a real man with a real record at the Bureau even if the stories surrounding him sound so strange. His father Robert Zimmermann worked for the state department for many years, and is colloquially called “Bad Bob” for his hard-line attitude and lack of a temper. His mother is, of course, Alicia Zimmermann, the actress. And there are stories that bleed into rumors about Agent Zimmermann himself, about his childhood and the drug-related meltdown he was supposed to have had, about his work on the Boggs case and his brusque, unfriendly attitude. They’re the kind of things that circulated like wildfire at the Academy. The Bureau’s black sheep. If you didn’t have at least one Zimmermann story (told to you by a friend of a friend, probably) then you didn’t know the right people. Eric, suffice to say, doesn’t have a Zimmermann story.

The X Files are--- well, they’re supposed to be a joke. A joke that’s Eric job now, apparently.

Eric himself is not legendary, and the rumors that circulate about him are less awe-filled ridicule and more of the traditional kind, the ones that are just plain mean even if they’re not always untrue. He stands in the hallway outside of Blevin’s office for a few minutes, fiddles with the end of his tie, tries to wrap his head around it.

A minute or two later, he decides to go do the one thing he knows he is truly good at. He stops at the store on the short walk back to his apartment for butter.

 

 

-

 

 

The day that Jack finds out about the case in Oregon, the day that he finds out he’s been assigned a partner, he dreams about it. A little reminder from the universe. Sometimes he can almost pretend he isn’t thinking about it. It always sits there, right at the base of his skull, right between his shoulder blades. But it’s nice to pretend, sometimes.

In his dream he’s seeing it happen from the outside, like he’s a stranger to his own body and his own life. He sees himself, caught in the awkwardness that’s indicative of the very last years of childhood, that ephemeral space occupied by people sitting on the edge of the rest of their lives but not yet ready to live them. When he wakes up he remembers the t-shirt he’d been wearing, and how his hair had been rumpled from sleep.

He can feel slivers of wood underneath his fingernails when he sits up in bed, and he flexes his hands against his thighs until they stop shaking, and then he gets up and goes for a run.

 

 

-

 

 

The inside of Bittle’s wrist is warm and his hands are dry and competent. He has to be at least a half a foot shorter than Jack is, so that when he enters the basement office Jack doesn’t have to reach much to look up at him from where he’s seated in front of the projector. He’s blonde. He looks like he’s just graduated high school. He looks green, untested. He has no idea what he’s walked into. He’s holding, of all things, a baking dish covered by a plaid red dishtowel in one hand, and he extends the other towards Jack as he enters the room.

All of it makes Jack angry, and he doesn’t try to hide it.

“Agent Zimmermann,” the young man says. “I’m Eric Bittle. I’ve been assigned to work with you.” He sounds exactly like what Jack would assume a tiny blonde man from the South would sound like.

“Oh,” Jack says, and takes his hand. Bittle shakes it firmly, doesn’t shy away. “Isn’t it nice to be so highly regarded. Who did you upset to get landed with this detail, Bittle?”

“Nobody,” Bittle says, quite sincerely. “Actually, I’m looking forward to working with you. I made this--” he offers the baking dish, and Jack thinks that this has to be some kind of joke. “I baked it, before I came over here. My mother always said you should never come to someone’s house empty-handed, and it’s not a bad bit of advice. It’s apple!” Jack stares at him, until Bittle sets the pie down on the desk. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Bittle continues, all big brown eyes and earnestness.

“Did they tell you anything about the case I’m working on?” Jack decides the best way to handle this is to get right to business, because already he’s off on a different foot than he’d wanted. He doesn’t feel like he has the upper hand.

“No,” Bittle says. Jack thinks he’s going to leave it at that but then he keeps going. “Would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it? I feel like I’m walking in here blind. Exciting though, right? I’m sorry, it’s just that when I get antsy I can prattle on about anything-- I’m just a chatterbox-- though there have been a few times where it’s come in handy let me--”

Jack sighs. Bittle stops talking when he gets up and inserts the slides with the images of Karen Swenson, the recently deceased girl from Oregon, into the projector. He turns it on, then hits the lights.

“Oregon female, twenty-one. No explainable cause of death, except these.” Jack advances the projector to show the image of the two bumps on Karen Swenson’s lower back. Agent Bittle takes a step closer to the screen, crossing his arms over his chest and looking up at it. Jack can’t help noticing the way his suit jacket sits across his shoulders-- he’s short but still strong. “Can you identify those marks?”

He’s presenting this as a trial by fire and he doesn’t care. This is his office, his project, his case. Jack has never asked that anyone offer him any assistance beyond getting the X Files reopened to begin with. But once that happened it was only a matter of time before someone up top decided that they couldn’t just leave Jack to his own devices down here. The information in these files is too close to the edge of something. This case is too close to the edge, and Jack can feel it, and he can’t just let it go.

He’d picked up this case because nobody had been paying any attention to it at all, and he might have missed it altogether if Shitty hadn’t practically shoved the newspaper clipping about the death of a young woman named Karen Swenson in a tiny town in Oregon into Jack’s face yesterday morning. Jack had sent in a request for the details, and then for more information on the mysterious substance found in the girl’s body, and then he’d gotten notice of his new partner.

Jack believes in a lot of things these days, but coincidence is not on that list.

Bittle frowns. “Well, listen, I’m no doctor,” he says, “but I’d reckon they’re needle marks, or scars. Maybe bug bites-- you know, back home the mosquitos could just eat you alive, they’re practically the size of dogs.”

“How’s your chemistry? This is the substance found in the surrounding tissue.” Jack advances the slide to show the molecular formula he’d gotten back that morning. Bittle’s frown deepens.

“Can’t say it was my favorite subject. It’s organic, isn’t it?”

“Dr. Oluransi thinks it’s a synthetic protein,” Jack says, “but I’ve never seen anything like it either. But here it is again--” he advances the slide. “And again.”

“And I’m guessing you have a theory.” There’s something caught up in the way Bittle says the words that rankles. Jack’s chosen this, but he never asked anyone to make fun of him.

“Yes,” he says shortly. “Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?”

Agent Bittle blinks, frowns, the space between his blonde brows creasing. “Logically,” he says quickly, “I would have to say no. It just doesn’t seem, I don’t know, possible for anyone to build a ship that can travel--”

Jack sighs, sharply. At least he didn’t just laugh. “Conventional wisdom,” he says. “That young woman is the fourth in her graduating class to die under mysterious circumstances, and nobody utilizing any conventional wisdom has been able to figure out why. Conventional wisdom is failing her right now, so why can’t we turn to the fantastic?”

Jack thinks for a moment that Bittle isn’t going to say anything, but after a second he snaps his mouth shut and uncrosses his arms, then recrosses them. The sleeves of his jacket are crisp. Something he’s said has upset his new partner, because he’s crossing his arms and pushing himself up onto his toes a little bit, stretching his height. Jack still towers over him but there’s a stubborn, fierce light in Bittle’s face that’s surprising, interesting.

“She obviously died of something,” he says, and his accent doesn’t sound like some kind of cartoon debutante now. “If it was natural causes, then someone flubbed the postmortem. If it was murder, then the investigation’s a mess. Now I don’t mean to be rude, but the only thing fantastic about this is the idea that there is something more than human error going on here! The answers are there, somewhere. You just have to put your nose to the grindstone and look for them.”

“That’s why they put the “I” in FBI,” Jack can’t help but say. He wants to smile, or put his fist through the wall.

“Bless your heart,” Bittle counters, and Jack know that he’s angry but there’s something else there too.

“Here’s the case file,” he says, cutting it off. He shoves the manila folder in Bittle’s direction, along with their planet tickets. “Our flight’s at eight. Don’t show up late.”

Bittle pauses at the door before leaving but Jack has turned back to his desk and doesn’t see him go. He leaves the pie behind.

 

 

-

 

 

Jack didn’t accept the recruitment offer from the Bureau to make friends. He doesn’t care if people like him. That ship has sailed a long time ago, and frankly it’s easier when they don’t because when they don’t they just leave him alone. He can deal with snide remarks in the halls as he passes. He can ignore the rumors, most of the time.

He doesn’t care if Special Agent Eric Bittle, blonde hair and ludicrous accent and freshly made baked goods and old-fashioned-home-spun enthusiasm, likes him at all. He just has to work with him, and he doesn’t have to do that for long. Just long enough for Jack to prove to him that he’s either too impossible to stick with or not as crazy as everyone says he is. That’s it.

Jack eats the pie for lunch. It’s delicious.

 

 

-

 

 

“So.” Shitty swings his legs so his heels, clad in beat up rubber sneakers, bounce against the desk he’s perched on. He’s grinning in a way that Jack would call “suspicious” on someone he was interrogating, and “shit-eating” if the pun wasn’t way too easy.

“So.” Jack repeats. He loosens his tie and leans against the doorframe to the Gunmen’s cluttered loft apartment. He’d come over here to get some information, but he’s fairly sure he won’t be able to leave until Shitty completes his interrogation.

He should learn his lessons and stop telling Shitty or Lardo anything. He should, but he won’t.

Shitty leans forward and props his elbows on his knees, and then his chin in his hands. In his unbuttoned flannel and tattered jeans, long hair swept out of his face with a pair of heavy black glasses that Jack is fairly sure he doesn’t actually need to wear to see, joint in hand, he looks like the member of a failing band. Somehow, he’s Jack’s best friend in the world. Naturally, Jack wants to strangle him.

“So!” Shitty repeats. “Well, what’s he like?” Jack stares at him stonily for a second but Shitty is undeterred. “Your partner! Your new other half!”

“Short,” Jack says. Lardo pokes her head out from around a book-crammed shelf and raises one eyebrow, so Jack amends himself quickly. “And blonde. And Southern.”

“Southern?” Shitty scratches his mustache and frowns. “He’s not a bigoted dickfaced cockhole, is he? I mean, beyond the general cockhole requirements for FBI agents these days.”

“I don’t know,” Jack says shortly.

“Father’s a high school football coach,” Lardo comes around the shelf to lean against the desk Shitty’s sitting on, leaning her elbow against his shoulder. They all fancy themselves to be cool antiestablishmentists, but Lardo’s the only one who really looks the part. Jack knows almost nothing about her life before she met the other two Gunmen, and he suspects she prefers it stay that way. Shitty’s story is no secret and he likes telling it; a dad he doesn’t get along with, a family legacy he doesn’t want. He’s got a law degree, battered sneakers aside, and threw it away for this. Lardo is just Lardo-- one of the best hackers Jack’s ever met, more mysterious connections than he can count. And she’s never explained what happened to stick her with Shitty. He’s got a way with people, despite it all. They make a funny pair.

Lardo slides into a chair next to the desk, taking the joint out of Shitty’s hand as she goes. She props her feet, two big black Doc Martin’s, on the tabletop. “Middle name’s Richard,” she continues, helpfully.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t hear you imply you’re doing my research for me,” Jack says. “He’s-- well. Bubbly. Made me a pie.”

“And you didn’t share?” Shitty clasps his hands over his chest, affronted.

“He’s a spy,” Jack snaps. “Pie isn’t going to change that. He’s been assigned to the X Files to discredit my work.”

“I thought he was kinda cute,” Lardo shrugs.

“For a spy.”

“Spies can’t be cute?”

“Might make ‘em better spies. I don’t know, man,” Shitty shrugs. “I got no doubt he’s a plant but the enigmatic Agent Bittle might grow on you, yknow? You gotta flash those Zimmermann baby blues, get the inside deets.”

“Do you have anything useful to share with me?” Jack sighs. Enigmatic Agent Bittle. “I’m getting on a plane to Oregon first thing in the morning, I’ve got to get going.”

“So you didn’t come over here just to lay a little sugar on me? Offended, Z Man.”

“Don’t call me that,” Jack says, but he smiles in spite of himself.

“Z Man the G Man,” Lardo says, sagely. “Alright, Zimmermann, listen to this. Vladmir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Russian Social Democrats? He’s being put into power by the most heinous and evil force of the 20th century.”

“Barney?” Jack asks with as much deadpan as he can muster.

“The C.I.A.,” Lardo says firmly, and Jack really can’t help but laugh.

“I meant about Oregon,” he says.

“No,” Shitty frowns. “Haven’t heard much! It’s been quiet up there for the last couple weeks, very low activity beyond the aforementioned dead teenager.”

“Strange,” Jack says. “Well, let me know if you do get any word. Anything unusual at all.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Shitty says. “And you let me know if you have any luck with the FBI’s only amazing baking agent.” Jack makes sure Shitty can see him roll his eyes before he turns to exit the apartment.

He almost doesn’t notice the third member of the Gunmen until he’s walking out the door and someone behind him chuckles. Jack turns to look at the bespoke man in the suit, the third contributor of _The Lone Gunman_ magazine, who is shaking his head.

“It’s funny,” Johnson says. “Just, I always thought that when they stuck you with a partner it’d be a red-headed woman.”

“What the hell are you off about, huh?” Shitty yells from inside the apartment, and Jack leaves them to it.

 

 

-

 

 

If Eric Bittle is a spy, then that makes Jack a soldier.

Oregon is green and wet and the road they drive down in their rental car is bordered by tall pines rather than city buildings. Jack drives with the windows open, eats his PB&J. Bittle listens to the radio, that month’s pop music hits. He hums along, watches the scenery drive past, and the sleeves of his jacket fall to cover his wrists because they’re too big. He sits in the passenger seat with his knees tucked up against his chest, taking up as little space as he can. He reads through the autopsy records from the previous investigation, makes a comment about the change in medical examiners.

“That’s pretty good, Bittle,” Jack says, and he hopes it sounds a little mean.

But Bittle just looks at him, dark eyes alighting on his face and then moving away. “Better than you expected, or better than you hoped?” He asks.

“I’ll let you know when we get past the easy part,” Jack says, and Bittle laughs.

If Jack is a soldier, then Eric Bittle is a spy, and all of this might be cause to get shot in the back.

When the radio changes channel unexpectedly, Bittle jabs with one square-nailed finger at the button to switch it back, but it doesn’t stay. It jitters, skitters across channels, throwing up static. The rental car’s clock goes haywire too, spitting out numbers and then symbols that might have been numbers once, and the static jumps in volume to a fever pitch. Bittle covers his ears and Jack slams his foot onto the brake of the car so they both bounce forward. He stares at the sky.

He can feel something in the air that hadn’t been there a minute before. Something has shifted from the damp, deep smell of wet earth and recent rain and it he can smell it and feel it too, crackling electricity in his ears and underneath his tongue. His pulse is racing unexpectedly, his heart going full-tilt. Then the sound cuts off, just like that.

“What the hell was that-- wait!” Jack opens the car door and Bittle follows him, taking two steps for every one of Jack’s as Jack strikes around the the back of the car and throws open the trunk. He moves Bittle’s suitcase out of the way and hunts through his own until he finds what he’s looking for, shoving neatly-folded socks and a pair of running shorts out of the way.

Bittle repeats himself when Jack uncaps the spray paint and leaves two lines on the asphalt, evidence of their passing.

“Probably nothing,” Jack says shortly, and slams the trunk of the car closed. They spent the rest of their drive to the graveyard, where an exhumed body of another dead teenager waits for them, in silence.

 

 

-

 

 

The body looks nothing like any body Eric’s ever seen before, and it smells hideous, rotting and cloying and wet. Jack is staring at it, his blue eyes intense and focused, and it’s all Eric can do to make himself stay in the room. He makes himself move around the table, snaps a few photos, takes a few deep breaths.

“What is it?” He asks, breathing through his mouth. Jack doesn’t look over at him, focused on the body. He’s peering at it’s desiccated face, looking into the too-large eye sockets that are sunken into grey, decaying tissue.

“The body weighs fifty-two pounds, in advanced stages of decomposition. I see large ocular cavities-- Bittle, photograph the head-- an obliate cranium-- pretty neat, eh?”

“It can’t be human.” Eric takes a photo of the head and doesn’t even protest at being ordered around.

“If it isn’t human, then what is it?”

“A monkey. An orangutan?”

“In Ray Soames’s grave.” Jack does turn to look at Eric and the slant of his eyebrows is hard.

“Kids pull the wildest pranks,” Eric says, faltering. “I wouldn’t put something like this past the fellas I grew up with, and small town Oregon can’t be all that different from small town Georgia. Now I think we really ought to ask where Ray Soames’s actual body has--”

“I want a tissue samples and x-rays,” Jack talks over him. “A blood type and toxicology, and a full genetic work up.”

“You can’t be serious!” Eric manages. “There is no way in hell that that-- thing-- is Ray Soames! This is someone’s sick joke!”

Jack crosses his arms. “What we can’t have done here we’ll ship back to D.C.”

“You think this is-- what--” Eric pauses, stares at him. “You think that’s an alien? E.T.? Is that’s what’s going on here? How am I gonna write that in my field report?”

“We’ll do the x-rays,” Jack repeats. “If it’s an orangutan, then you’ll have your answer.”

It isn’t, of course. And when the county doctor finds a tiny metallic object embedded in the body’s nose, Jack turns and stares at Eric with something that borders on triumph.

 

 

-

 

 

Jack makes himself go on a run after they check into the hotel, to clear his head. He loosens his tie, pulls on his running shoes. He passes Bittle on his way out the door, and thinks about asking him to come along but can’t bring himself to do it.

He makes it three miles before it catches up with him, a tight knot of muscle that constricts around his chest and won’t let go.

Jack walks the three miles back, and his hands shake and shake.

 

 

-

 

 

Everyone deals with their problems in their own ways, Eric thinks, as he kneads dough on the tiny hotel kitchen counter. He’d passed Jack on the pathway between their hotel rooms, dressed in running shorts and an Oxford Athletics t-shirt, and Jack hadn’t asked him to come along and Eric hadn’t wanted to. Instead, Eric had to beg the hotel owner to let him in and then to let him borrow a few bowls and a pie tin, and he’s whipping butter as he stares at the x-ray of the tiny metal object they’d found inside Ray Soames’s body. If he was a different kind of person he’d say it looks like some kind of medical implement. But that would mean--

Eric digs his knuckles harder into the dough and rubs at his forehead, smearing flour there. He doesn’t know what any of it means.

He can’t shake the image of the shriveled, greying body from his mind and it’s getting worse as the sun gets lower in the sky. He knows it can’t be what Jack thinks it is because that’s impossible and the body, however distorted, was real. They’d both seen it. He’d touched it with his hands, photographed it.

Eric wouldn’t call himself a skeptic necessarily, but he does know when things are possible and when they’re not because he doesn’t have any other choice. When he doesn’t have any other choice, he tries not to think about it at all. He believes in some things that other people might consider kooky; the healing power of butter and sugar, the importance of family above almost anything else, the inescapable and near-religious importance of football. He does believe in God, because it’s never really crossed his mind that he shouldn’t, and he’s Southern so it’s practically a given.

He’s never believed in anything with the kind of force that Jack Zimmermann carries bottled up inside him, the pure and fierce conviction that seems to propel him to accept impossibilities. It reminds Eric, weirdly, of his father, the tunnel-vision all-or-nothing mindset that drives him to want to win and win.

All Eric knows is that there are people who are dead, that it’s his job to figure out why.

His parents had been worried when he’d decided on this as a career path, because it doesn’t seem like it’s the kind of thing he’d be good at. Bad at football. Bad at fitting in. He’s a crack shot, though, and though he isn’t exactly a quick study he can try hard when he wants to. He’s good at reading people, good at getting them to open up, and Eric knows it’s because he’s disarming and unassuming, almost juvenile. It works in his advantage. The effect is probably doubled when he’s paired with tall, dark and broad-shouldered Agent Zimmermann.

Being accepted to the Academy had made his mother worry, but it had almost had the opposite effect on his father. Eric sometimes likes to fancy it helped them understand each other, even if his dad doesn’t necessarily understand this, because there have been a lot of things Eric’s been good at that his dad hadn’t even wanted to try at caring about. Solving a case is like puzzling out the plays in a game, and a win is a win if someone else loses. His father is “Coach,” even at home, out of sheer habit, and Eric sometimes wonders where the line is between “Agent” and “Eric.” He tries not to worry about things like that for too long.

He has no idea how he’s going to explain what the X Files are to his parents. The idea is so impossible that it’s funny.

He slides the pie into the borrowed oven. The sun has gone down. Eric picks up the tiny evidence bottle containing the metal object they’d found inside Ray Soames’s body, and stares at it. He thinks about the body on the autopsy table. He thinks about Jack marking an innocuous stretch of highway with an X.

There had to have been something to have made him this way, and Eric knows he's nosy almost to a fault, but he can't help thinking that maybe he is being punished somehow, being stuck with this job. 

Of course he had to be good looking, too. 

 

 

-

 

 

The body in the coffin leads them to two kids in a hospital. It’s warm and humid and feels like rain later; Eric is hot and uncomfortable in his suit coat. He’s never liked hospitals. He broke his collarbone figure skating when he was thirteen, and hospital halls take him back to painkillers and bad food. The kids had been involved in a car accident. They were classmates of the other kids, who are dead. Billy Miles and Peggy O’Dell. Billy has dark hair and his eyes are open and glassy, and Eric feels sorry for him, wants to get out of here.

The girl is in a wheelchair until she falls out of it, blood streaming from her nose, and when she hits the floor Eric can see three marks on her lower back. They’re identical to the ones on Karen Swenson’s body, and Eric’s hands feel like ice when he turns and walks out of the hospital ward. He knows he can’t outpace Jack but he gives it a shot, and he’s sitting somewhere in between anger and fear as he almost runs down the hospital steps. Jack catches his arm before Eric walks into the road.

“How’d you--” Eric doesn’t know what to say. “How the hell did you know that girl was gonna have those marks?”

“Lucky guess,” Jack says, and his jaw is hard.

“Damn it, Jack, cut the crap!” Eric snaps, his anger eating up his fear at the set of Jack’s mouth. “What is going on here? What are those marks? What is it that you know?”

“So you can put it down in your little report, Bittle?” Jack snarls, and Eric can tell he’s angry too. His eyes are very blue, his brows turned down. Eric takes a very deep breath.

“You can call me by my damn name, you know. I’m here to solve this case,” he says, as calmly as he can. “Whatever else you think-- I want the truth.”

“I think those kids have been abducted,” Jack says, all firm conviction, and if it had been anything else Eric might have believed him.

It’s one thing to say that something strange is happening that they don’t yet have an explanation for, and another to attest that a bunch of high school graduates are riding around in flying saucers. Eric can’t believe it. He can’t.

The only thing he can think of to do next is to drive out to the woods where the sheriff found Karen Swenson’s body, where all four of the victims were found. Jack drives, Eric sits in the passenger. They don’t talk. Eric turns on the radio, and Jack turns it off. He sits and looks out the window, watches the clouds building in the distance. He has his raincoat on, and a flashlight in his jacket.

Eric likes road trips, likes the rhythm of the trees as they pass by and the unfamiliar roads as they unfold underneath car wheels. Half of the streets in this town don’t have named street signs. It makes him think of the town he was born in, and most of his thoughts about that town aren’t great, so it’s a nice change. Jack drives with both his hands planted on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road.

If anything, maybe this trip is going to teach Eric how to shut the hell up for long periods of time, because talking to Jack Zimmermann is like talking to a handsome stone wall.

The Collum National Forest, where the bodies were found, is a dense, dark tangle of trees the color of old moss. It hardly looks real, like something straight from a horror movie or a fairy tale. Their flashlight beams skirt over tree trunks and fallen logs in the gathering darkness, and Eric feels shivers at the base of his spine. He stays quiet until he literally can’t keep his mouth shut any longer.

“This is terrifying,” he says, in a whisper. It’s starting to rain. “Makes sense why a bunch of kids would hang around out here, though. Probably trying to scare the shit out of each other. You ever do stuff like that when you were young? All the kids I went to high school with did-- what’s this?”

He points at the ground with his flashlight and Jack kneels to look at it. The leaf debris is covered in some kind of residue Eric doesn’t recognize. Jack scoops some up into an evidence vial and shrugs.

Eric is leaning down to get a better look when they hear something crashing in the woods behind them, which makes Eric jump and then trip over a treeroot. He lands on his backside and scowls when Jack laughs a little. When Jack extends a hand to pull him back to his feet Eric tries not to think about how much bigger Jack's hands are than his, or the calluses on his palms.

"Maybe it's Bigfoot," he says. 

"Hey," Jack counters. "You have been paying attention. This is the right area of the country for sightings, you know." 

"You believe in Bigfoot?" 

"I'll believe in anything until I have a reason not to," Jack says.

Ten minutes later when the town sheriff materializes out of the woods and points his gun at them, demands that they leave the forest, Eric almost wants to laugh.

“Nothing like being threatened with a firearm by a crazy man in uniform to make you feel like home,” he says as they get back into their car. The rain has picked up and his hair is wet.

“What’s he doing out here all by himself?” Jack asks. He starts the engine and turns on the windshield wipers, which flick water off the car window as they pull away from their parking spot.

“Maybe he’s mixed up in all this.”

“Maybe it’s got something to do with this, eh?” Jack holds out the vial and Eric bends across the car armrest to peer at its contents. It looks more like ashes from a campfire than anything but it had stuck out so clearly against the leaf litter in the forest. “A campfire?”

“I don’t know,” Eric says. “Something is going on out here-- what if those kids are involved some kind of-- ritual sacrifice and that man knows about it?”

“Maybe-- wait--” Jack pauses, glancing at his watch and then at the car’s dashboard, then back at his watch.

“You okay?” Eric asks, confused.

“Yeah-- it’s--” Jack peers down at his wrist, then up through the windshield towards the sky.

“What are you looking for?” Eric asks, but he’s cut off by a sudden static shriek from the radio, and a distant roar that sounds almost like thunder through the trees. There’s a bright light, white and hot, and they both throw their hands up over their eyes but by the time Eric does the light is gone.

The car rolls to a stop, and Eric peels his hands from his face, struggling to breathe against his own racing heart. There are spots in his eyes, asymmetrical black blotches obscuring his vision, and his ears are ringing. He can smell something too, something bright and acidic, like battery acid.

“What--”

“We lost power--” Jack turns the car key in the ignition and nothing happens. “Brakes, steering-- everything--”

“How--” Jack is staring at his watch, and when he looks up again he makes Eric jump. From what he can see of Jack’s face it’s wild, unsettling, shocked.

“We lost nine minutes!” Jack shouts, and he throws open the car door and almost falls out of it into the rain. Eric doesn’t know what else to do, so he follows him.

“We lost what?” He has to scream to be heard over the rain.

“Nine minutes!” Jack runs a hand through his hair so it stands on end, his face exhilarated. “I looked at my watch right before the car stopped, it was nine-o-three! Now it’s nine-thirteen!”

“Y’all-- you-- that can’t--” Eric splutters, but Jack turns and runs off down the road. And, God help him, Eric follows him, his shoes sliding on the wet asphalt.

“Look!” Jack yells. “Look!” He pauses, pointing, and Eric’s heart stutters to a halt.

The X that Jack had painted onto the road the day before is right in front of them. Jack stands with his feet planted on either side of it and looks up at the sky and yells, like a quarterback after a touchdown. Eric struggles to catch his breath without inhaling rainwater, still rubbing spots out of his eyes. It's dark but the mark on the ground is clear, and this can't be a coincidence. His mind races through the possibilities. Did Jack set this up somehow? Is it a trick to convince Eric that something less-than-ordinary is going on here? 

There are a hundred things that Jack isn't telling him, and Eric is scared that once he hears everything Jack knows that he's going to agree with him.

“I don’t--”

“Abductees!” Jack shouts. “People who see UFOs, they report unexplained time loss!” He grabs Eric by the shoulder and leaves his hand there, water flying out of his hair.

“No,” Eric says. “That’s impossible!”

“Gone! Just like that!”

“Time doesn’t just--- vanish!” Eric screams back. “It’s a universal invariant!”

Jack grins, and at the same time the car restarts, flooding them both with the yellow light. They both jump. The light illuminates the rain, highlighting silver streaks in the night air, and it reflects off of the whites of Jack's eyes as he turns to walk back towards the car. He throws another look over his shoulder. 

“Not in this zipcode.”

 

 

-

 

 

Back in the hotel, Eric tries to categorize the things that he's sure of, lay them all out as logically as he can. It isn't his strong suit most of the time, but of the two of them the burden of trying to explain to anybody else what exactly is going on here is falling on him. He wraps a blanket around his shoulders and sits down on the hotel bed in front of his laptop, frowning at the screen. Four kids from the same graduating class have died. They were all found in the same area of the woods. Something happened to the body they had exhumed, and the boy to whom that body belonged had been treated in the same hospital where two more kids from his class are staying. Karen Swenson and Peggy O'Dell have near identical marks on their lower backs, the same as several other victims found dead in other parts of the country. The medical examiner lied on three of the autopsies, and the fourth was done by somebody else. And the town's sheriff was lurking in the woods near the area where all the bodies were found.

And aliens, apparently. And a missing nine minutes. 

Eric slumps forward over his keyboard, rubbing at his eyes. It seems like a pointlessly ridiculous string of facts and none of them add up. Pure logic isn't what he's great at-- he relies on his intuition more often than not, the way things feel and how people act. 

His intuition is telling him that something is very wrong here, something unlike anything he's ever seen before in his life. His gut reaction is to get the hell out of Dodge. 

Missing nine minutes. Eric sighs and sits up to stare at the keyboard. There are a lot of nine-minute chunks of his life he'd wish could just go missing, but the world just doesn't work like that. 

 _Agent Zimmermann's insistence of time loss due to unknown forces cannot be validated by this witness,_  he types, and even typing it out looks ridiculous. But still, something did happen, to the car and to them. Eric can still smell the bitter battery-acid stench in the back of his throat, and he feels shivery and cold, like he's got a fever. It's probably the rain, and running around in the woods all night. 

But something had happened.

Eric's intuition is telling him to trust Jack, and that's maybe the strangest part of all of this. 

He turns back to the laptop, trying to find the right way to put into words what they'd discovered today, when a crack of lighting illuminates the room from outside. Thunder follows a minute later, and a second after that the power goes out. 

"Great," Eric says, and slams the laptop closed. He hopes the hot water is still functioning, at least. There are candles in the bedside table and he lights one with the little book of matches, then goes into the bathroom, pulling his shirt over his head as he goes. 

The water is hot when he turns the faucet on, and he runs his fingers under it for a minute before sticking the plug into the tub and searching for a towel. What he really wants is a bottle of wine and the radio on, but he'll settle for a bath and a candle for now. Eric glances at his own reflection in the mirror for a second, grimaces at his hair, which is curling because of the rain and humidity. He goes to pull his boxers off and then freezes when his own fingers meet something on his lower back.

For half a minute he thinks he's going to be sick-- his stomach and heart feel like they've inverted somehow inside his chest and he can feel his heartbeat up against his throat. It's irregular and way too fast, and just like that he's covered head to toe in a cold sweat, a horrible creeping fear. 

Eric yanks on his bathrobe and leaves his bathroom almost at a run, doubling back to turn off the water before he walks out the hotel room door in his bare feet. 

 

 

-

 

 

“Hi,” Jack says, when he opens the door and finds Bittle standing there in his bathrobe. He looks spooked, clutching the terrycloth tight around his neck, and he doesn’t wait for Jack to ask him to come in before he steps through the doorway.

“I need you to look at something,” he says, and Jack hasn’t known him very long but he can tell there’s a different quality to his voice, an unsteady one. Something’s wrong. Jack’s pulse jumps unexpectedly. The candle in his hand wavers, its flame unsteady.

“What is it?”

Rather than answering, Bittle turns around so his back is facing Jack and slides his bathrobe down his shoulders. He’s shirtless, wearing red plaid boxers, and Jack’s mouth takes a second or two to catch up and he’s about to say something, anything really, when he sees them.

There are two bumps on his lower back, right at the spot where his spine curves upward. Bittle glances over his shoulder at Jack, and his eyes are huge and frightened.

“What are they?” he asks, his voice barely a whisper. Jack’s hands are clammy around the candle and he makes himself kneel down to get a better look, bringing the candle as close as he can to Bittle’s back without burning him.

He has freckles on his shoulders. Jack can’t help but notice them.  

Jack can almost hear Bittle hold his breath and screw his eyes shut when he touches the marks, his skin too warm against Jack’s fingers.

“Jack, what are they?” he repeats, and Jack lets out a long breath and laughs.

“Mosquito bites,” he says, and stands up.

“Are you sure?” Bittle’s voice is almost frantic with relief.

“Yes. I have quite a few myself. Got eaten alive out there.”

“Oh, thank God,” Bittle gasps, and he yanks the robe back up over his shoulders and then he turns around and seizes Jack around the middle, buries his face against Jack’s chest.

Jack’s first instinct is to pull backwards and away but he doesn’t, partially because he’s holding a candle and partially because-- well-- because he doesn’t want to. He can feel Bittle’s pulse through his ribcage and Bittle’s breathing against his collarbone, his fingers against Jack’s ribs. He lets his free hand drop and rest on Bittle’s shoulder, terrycloth separating his hand from Bittle’s freckles.

“You okay?” he asks, because he feels suddenly guilty that he’s dragged Bittle through this without telling him anything of what he suspects, why this case means so much. When Bittle nods, Jack lets his chin rest against his hair for a minute, a strange and almost crushingly innocent intimacy, two people who have seen something strange together and who don’t have anybody else.

They’d lost nine minutes in the blink of an eye, and time isn’t supposed to be a malleable thing but it stretches and it jumps, slows this moment down and compresses it. Bittle’s fingers against Jack’s ribcage and their own shadows, long and translucent and shifting in wavering candlelight.

 

 

-

 

 

When Jack asks, Eric thinks about it for a long few minutes, pulling his bathrobe up around his shoulders to lean back against scratchy hotel room blankets.

“Because--” he says, then pauses. Jack is sitting on the floor, his head leaning back against the bed. Eric can see the spot at the crown of his head where his hair radiates outward, a spiral of thick dark strands. “Because the world has rules,” he says finally. “Things that happen, over and over, and that’s the way they are. It has to, otherwise nothing would mean anything It doesn’t mean they’re good, or that I like them, but it ain’t-- it doesn’t-- you can’t just say that they don’t exist, you know?” He flushes a little at the grammatical slip-up. He’s tired. He’s tried as hard as he could to shake the “aint’s” out of his speech when he left home, but they work their way in there when he’s tired, when he’s drunk.

“Then what about all this?” Jack asks, quietly.

“It means we’re missing something. Or that we don’t know all the rules yet. It’s like--” Eric shifts a little to move his arm under his head, on Jack’s pillow. “Okay. It’s like baking.”

“Baking.”

“Hear me out, alright? Recipes follow a pattern, they do the same thing every time. When you combine flour, sugar and butter in the right way you get a pie crust. If that doesn’t work, then there’s something wrong. Maybe you missed a step, maybe there’s a change in the altitude and you need to do something else. You have to find out what that is. The rules don’t just fly on out the window because things don’t add up.”

“If your questions don’t work you’re not asking the right questions,” Jack says slowly. That’s not entirely what Eric meant but he isn’t going to press it. “How’d you end up in the FBI instead of culinary school, eh?”

“Because I’m bad at football,” Eric says. Jack turns his head to look at him, and half is face is in shadow while the other half is caught in the candlelight-- the line of his nose, his chin.

 

 

-

 

 

It’s still raining and they can hear it on the hotel windows, and it’s quiet in the room. There’s a quality to the silence late at night that makes it different from any other silences. It’s larger and heavier, muffled echo and a heavy blanket of quiet. Held breath. When Jack starts talking he doesn’t try very hard to be heard over the rain. It isn’t a story you just tell. Until it is.

 

 

-

 

 

“It happened when we were both seventeen. That summer. We’d thought it was going to be the best summer, too. Four days.” The words feel heavy coming out, and he’s having a hard time stringing them together. This isn’t a story you just tell. Jack rests his head on the mattress and closes his eyes, and behind him he can feel Bittle’s-- Eric’s-- eyes on him.

“And you have no idea what happened to you?”

“When it happened they thought it was a kidnapping, or something. Because of Dad’s work. Afterwards, the papers kept saying we’d just gone off on a bender, like kids do. Kent-- we-- we didn’t remember anything. We were gone, we showed up again four days later. All beat up, bruised. There were no facts, nothing to explain it.”

“What did you do?” Eric’s voice is hushed and Jack keeps his eyes closed.

“Well,” he says, and he laughs even though it isn’t funny. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.”

“Yeah.” Jack appreciates that he doesn’t deny it.

“After rehab, I went off to school in England. Came back to Montreal, then to D.C., got recruited by the Bureau. My success gave me a fair amount of freedom to pursue my own interests, and that’s when I found the X Files.”

“By accident?”

Jack doesn’t know, because theoretically the answer to that question is yes, but he makes a point not to believe in coincidences. He turns to look at Eric, resting his arms on the bed and balancing on his heels. Eric is leaning up against his elbows and the pillows to look at him, hair still a little wet, curling at the ends. He tells him how the basement room had looked when he’d first stumbled across it, stacks and stacks of dusty boxes crammed into filing cabinets, abandoned. Someone had worked on organizing them, once, but more recent case files had been tossed into boxes at random. Piles of unsolved murders, unanswered questions, hinting at things he’d only dared to begin to think about. A thousand potential “what if’s,” stacked into a room and then ignored. When he pauses, Eric sits up all the way.

“What?” he asks.

“There’s classified government information I’ve been trying to access, ever since I found the X Files, but someone’s been blocking my attempts to get it.”

“Who?” Eric is frowning. “I don’t understand.”

“Someone way, way up. The only reason I haven’t been shut down completely is because of the connections I have. They think--”

“That you’ll leak this information?”

“You’re a part of that agenda, you know that.”

Eric does sit up, yanks at the neck of his bathrobe a little. “I’m not part of any agenda. I’m here to solve cases. You have to trust me.”

Jack wants to. That surprises him. The concentrated fierceness he’d seen on Eric’s face the first day they met is back. “Bittle, I’m telling you this because you need to know, because of what’s happening here. I’ve been trying since I was seventeen to understand what happened to me, and I’ve gone through deep regression hypnosis. I’ve been able to go into my own repressed memories of the night that we were taken. I remember--” he’s surprised to find his voice is unsteady. This isn’t a story he tells. “There was a light. A presence in the room. Our calls for help-- my own--” he cuts himself off. “It exists. I’ve seen it. Maybe more than seen it. And the government knows about it.” He leans closer on the bed because this is the most important thing he’s said in a while, and he has to know that Eric knows that. He can’t read the expression on Eric’s face.

“I have to know what they’re protecting,” Jack says, tight and fierce and angry. “Nothing else matters to me. And I’ve never been closer.”

He can’t ask the questions until he knows what questions to ask. His questions can never be big enough.

He’s been asked why it matters so much, why he can’t find a way to let it go. Letting it drop would mean letting someone else win. His memories of those days had come to him in flashes, on and off, moments of clarity that always felt too real. In rehab, they’d felt realer than anything else. An acrid, chemical smell. A light. His fingers clinging so hard to his own bedpost they gouged wood from it that got caught in his nails. Kent’s fingers on his arm, tight enough to bruise. Pieces, symbols, parts of a whole. Fragments.

He remembers what comes after much better. Pills from a white bottle in the palm of his hand. His father’s lips pressed tight together, his assertions that this is all his fault. It’s nobody’s fault but Jack’s, and he has to make sense of it.

“It was years ago,” Kent had said the last time he’d come to see Jack. He’d come to see Jack because Jack had stopped picking up the phone. He’d just gotten a promotion, a shiny American flag button pinned to his lapel, and it had stuck out like a sore thumb. They hadn’t followed each other, exactly, but they hadn’t been able to shake each other either.

“I know,” Jack had said, and to be honest he wasn’t sure what Kent had been talking about.

“I don’t get it, Zimms,” Kent had said. The nickname had stuck in Jack’s throat, like being seventeen. “You’re shut down here in a basement for-- what? I don’t get it.”

“I know.”

“Let me ask around for you, alright? You’re a good agent. You don’t have to do this-- whatever this is-- hunting Bigfoot by yourself because you’re hung up on something you saw on a bad trip or you don’t want to live up to your father’s legacy or whatever the fuck this is about.”

“Leave, Parse,” Jack had said, and Kent had. He hadn’t called at all after that.

Jack dreams about him, sometimes, but he has a hard time telling where the dreams end and the nightmares begin. He hadn’t been able to sleep in his own bed, with the slivers of wood carved away by his own fingernails. It was the first place they’d slept together.

All of this is sitting on the tip of his tongue and he’s staring up at Eric’s face which is trapped somewhere in between bewilderment and wonder, when the phone rings.

 

 

-

 

 

“Your friend,” Eric says, halfway through the short ride to the scene of the accident. Jack glances over at him. He’s staring back. “You didn’t say what happened to him.”

“We don’t talk much anymore,” Jack says, and doesn’t offer anymore, and Eric doesn’t ask.

 

 

-

 

 

Jack is paranoid, Eric can’t deny that. Cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. But then Peggy O’Dell, the girl from the hospital, gets hit by a truck, and all Eric can see is the cracked glass of her watch, blood smeared across the bottom of its face. Eric’s trying to pull himself together, get more information on what happened, when Jack grabs his shoulder to tell him someone stole the body from the morgue.

And then, of course, their hotel burns down.

Jack swears, tugs his hands through his hair, and they stand side by side and watch the firefighters tackle the blaze that’s destroying all the evidence they had, along with Eric’s work-issued laptop and three new suits. It’s beginning to rain, moisture sticking to Eric’s hair.

When Theresa Nemman, the medical examiner's daughter, tells them she believes she’s in danger, Eric believes her.

When they drive to the graveyard in the rain to find two rectangular holes where two bodies should be, Eric begins to feel like someone’s trapped his tail under a chair and is just waiting for the right moment to roll right over it. He stares at the empty graves and they stare back, two deep depressions in the ground already beginning to fill with rainwater and mud. Two more reminders that nothing about this case makes any sense, that nothing really has since he walked into that basement office the day before yesterday.

 

 

-

 

 

Something about the rain, which is already soaking through Jack’s raincoat and has plastered Bittle’s curls to his forehead, makes it make sense. The rain and the empty graves, Peggy O’Dell’s body that had been confined to a wheelchair and yet had still managed to jump in front of a truck. All of a sudden, Jack understands it. He clings onto that feeling, the certain heady accumulation of how it feels to see everything line up, facts in a neat line, dates in history. He knows who did it.

Bittle-- Eric-- stares at him through the rain. “The boy in the hospital?” he splutters. Water is dripping down his nose, clinging to his eyelashes. They’re still very blonde. “The fellow who’s been in a-- a coma for the last four damn years went on a midnight stroll out here to do some gravedigging?”

“I’m not making this up!” Jack insists, because it feels very important to convince him, that Eric believe him. “It all fits the profile of alien abduction--”

“This?” Eric sweeps his arms out, at the graves and the rain, then wipes water from his chin. It’s cold, getting colder as they get wetter, and Jack can see him shivering. He looks irate, almost hysterical. “This fits the profile?”

“We lost nine minutes,” Jack says, as firmly as he can. Eric is staring and staring and Jack knows too well how it feels to know people think he’s crazy but he’d almost thought-- “And Peggy O’Dell was killed around nine o’clock. Something happened to us, to her. Time as we know it stopped, somehow. You think I’m crazy.”

He turns back towards the car but Eric doesn’t agree with him and he doesn’t move.

“Peggy O’Dell’s watch stopped a few minutes after nine. I saw it on her body-- I saw--”

Water is running down Jack’s back now, soaking his shirt. Eric’s hair is dark with it, almost. He’s staring at Jack.

“The forest controls the kids somehow, summons them here!” Jack can’t stop himself and he steps closer, shoes squelching in the grass. He raises his voice to be heard over the drum of the rain, to reassure himself. “Something happened to them out here and it’s got ahold of them somehow. It’s controlling Billy Miles. And-- and the marks are from some kind of test-- it’s causing a genetic mutation that explains that body we dug up--”

“And that force called Theresa Nemman into the forest tonight--” Eric talks over him, practically yelling to be heard over the rain. He’s staring up at Jack, almost swaying on his feet from the cold and the strangeness of it all, and they’re far closer together than Jack had thought.

“And it was Billy Miles that took her there!” Jack yells back.

When Eric starts laughing, it doesn’t hurt. He laughs and laughs, water running off his chin and from his hair, eyes bright even in the dark, and it’s the best sound Jack has heard all day. He doesn’t know if it’s hysterics, just the wild improbability of it, if he’s laughing at Jack or at nothing at all. Jack doesn’t care. Watching him laugh breaks up something inside Jack’s own chest and he grins back, rainwater in his teeth as he smiles.

Eric leans against Jack’s arm as they walk back towards the car to drive back to the hospital, and Jack doesn’t move away.

 

 

-

 

 

From the outside it’s very doubtful that it looks that way, but Jack is a meticulous planner. He likes to categorize things, mark them completed and file them, place them in order and evaluate their meaningfulness, how they connect, how they lead to one another. When he was young, Jack was careful all the time. Fatalistic, even. Maybe he still is, in a way that’s changed because he’s changed. He’s only gotten here because of his own internal insistence that there isn’t any other way to reach his goal. Kent used to make fun of him for his lack of ability to be spontaneous, to live on the fly. If he wasn’t so difficult, everything would be so much easier.

What he can’t figure out is where Eric Bittle fits. Jack has known him for days only and he’s already refusing to fit into any of the categories Jack has created for him. He can’t keep up.

He doesn’t know if he wants to.

 

-

 

Billy Miles is still in the hospital bed, same as before, and it all seems much less fantastic in the quiet, antiseptic-tinged hospital ward, out of the rain and the dark and Jack’s grin. Eric stares at the boy in the bed, thinking he’s never felt less like an FBI agent in his life. Jack makes stilted small-talk with the night nurse as Eric peers at Billy Miles’s fingernails and pushes his own soggy hair out of his face.

But when he looks at the kid’s feet his heart stops, stutters fast, and his hands are shaking as he pulls out the evidence vial. He leaves the room almost at a run, hears Jack say goodbye to the nurse behind him, thinks that he’s supposed to be the polite one between the two of them.

“He was in the woods!” Eric says, at the same time that Jack asks him if he’s sure.

“This is the same damn stuff we found in the forest!” Eric insists, gesturing with the tissue he’s got clutched in his hand. He expects triumph on Jack’s face but Jack just keeps pace with him, nods.

“Then we should test it, to be sure,” he says.

“The original sample went up in flames!” Eric says sharply. It’s been two days of “aliens” this and “extraterrestrials” that and he doesn’t understand why Jack is countering him, his face caught in careful neutrality. “But what else could it be?”

“Bittle,” Jack says, and he stops walking so Eric stops too. “I need you to think about what you’re saying, what it means.”

“You said it not five minutes ago!” Eric squawks, jabbing his finger into Jack’s stomach.

“I know,” Jack says. “I agree with you. I’ve got your back.” He pauses and takes a deep breath and doesn’t seem to notice the heat in Eric’s face at all. “But you have to write that down in your report.”

“Oh,” Eric says, because of course. “I-- damnit.” He runs his hands through his hair, trying to collect himself, the heat in his face, his racing heart. “Okay. We’ll go take another sample from the forest and compare it to this, make sure we’ve got all our bases covered. Right? We’ll do that before we do anything.”

Jack nods firmly, his jaw set but his eyes soft, and Eric doesn’t know what that means.

 

 

-

 

 

They try to make sense of what happened on the drive to the airport, and can’t. They find the sheriff’s car parked on the road, not far from where Karen Swenson was found. They find the sheriff not long after that, and he hits Eric in the back of the head with the butt of his gun, then aims it at Jack before Jack can even yell his name. And before he can fire, there are screams in the distance. A girl’s voice. Theresa Nemman.

“How long are you going to let it happen?” Jack yells. “He’s going to kill her!” The sheriff, Billy Miles’s father, looks in the direction of the screams, and when he abandons the gun Jack runs after him.

The wind whips up around them, brisk and strong, tossing leaves up under their feet and under the feet of the boy who is supposed to be lying in a hospital bed. And then--

There’s a light. Billy Miles lifts Theresa Nemman’s body, but then lets her go, and then he opens his eyes. The shadows in the forest are long and wild, distorted by the light from the sky that doesn’t seem to have a source.

It’s exactly what Jack expected it to be. It’s not at all what he expected to find. His heart is racing so fast it hurts, a reminder that this is real, that he’s here and this is real, this is real and--

Where is Bittle?

“Eric!” Jack yells, and he turns from the sheriff and his son back into the woods, searching for Eric’s flashlight among the trees.

He finds him where he’d left him, rubbing the back of his head. Eric scrambles to his feet when he sees Jack coming out of the trees.

“Jack, what happened?” Eric has dirt on his face, smudged along his chin. His eyes are bright and scared. “There was a light--”

“It was incredible--” Jack says, and Eric grasps at his arms and holds onto them, holding him up as much as he’s steadying himself.

It was real. It was real, it was real, it was real. Jack clings onto Eric’s arms with his fingertips and repeats this as they stare at each other.

 

 

-

 

 

He dreams about it, later. Years later. And when he does he also dreams about Eric’s hands on his forearms, his small, strong fingers and how the inside of his wrist had been dry when Jack had shaken his hand.

 

 

-

 

 

Jack meant it when he'd said he'll believe in just about anything. When he was little his mom used to tell him ghost stories when he'd been tucked under the covers with the snow coming down outside. She was great at doing the voices. The first of her movies Jack saw was a horror film, and she'd died, covered in fake blood, at the hands of a swarm of zombies. His dad had been worried it would scare him, but Jack had known right away that it was fake. He'd watched it over and over, his mother's twenty-year-old face and her very convincing screams, and that always made her laugh. 

He'll believe in anything until there's evidence to the contrary, because limiting one possibility limits all of them, and the universe exists in a continuum of related events and phenomena, asteroids colliding with the atmosphere like they should until they stop doing what they should. There's meaning in all of this, and Jack hasn't found it yet but it doesn't mean he's going to stop looking. And, really, believing in something so large makes your own shortcomings seem so small in comparison, even when they feel so all-encompassing. That was something he'd learned in rehab. (He doubts very much his therapist meant for it to be applied to the hope of far-away life in other galaxies, though).

It's so strange to be confronted with something that edges towards being evidence, like being hit hard in the face. Like the opposite of a panic attack. They fly back to D.C. and sit side by side on the plane and Jack looks out the window at the clouds underneath the wings. Eric talks for a while about what he has to do when he gets home, tells a story about something one of his aunts said to another one, and Jack listens to him for a while and watches the sun set as they fly east. 

"You can tell me to knock it off," Eric says eventually. "It's a bad habit, I'm sorry. You should have heard me during my interview for the Academy-- embarrassing." 

"It's alright," Jack says, and he means it. He likes the way Eric talks about what's on his mind with a complete lack of self-consciousness until he slows down, and he likes that Eric is telling this stuff to Jack at all. They make a pretty good team, actually. Jack never wanted a partner before, because some things can't be replaced. Maybe they don't have to be.

"I never told you," he says suddenly, and Eric looks up from the in-flight magazine. "Your pie. It was good." 

"Well," Eric flushes a little, and smiles easily and softly. "Bless your heart." 

 

 

-

 

 

The boy from the hospital testifies, and what he has to say doesn’t make any sense. They stand next to each other, on the other side of the window where Billy Miles is being interrogated, and Jack looks Eric in the eye for a long time as they listen to what Billy has to say.

There’s a man with a cigarette standing in a corner of the room, and when he mutters something in Section Chief Blevins’s ear Jack’s fists tighten at his sides.

“I’m afraid,” Billy Miles says. “I’m afraid they’re coming back.” Something cold sits in the pit of Eric’s stomach, even if he can’t believe it, even if he can’t.

Later, he turns over the metal object they’d found inside Ray Soames’s skull, the thing Billy Miles describes as a communication device. Eric sets it on Blevins’s desk and immediately wonders if he’s done the right thing.

“And Agent Zimmermann,” Blevis says, staring at the tiny glass vial. “What are his thoughts?”

Eric licks his lips. “Agent Zimmerman,” he says, “believes we are not alone.”

When he leaves the office he passes the man with the cigarette in the hallway, and Eric watches him enter the Section Chief’s office and feels, not unlike how he’d felt the first time he’d been asked to come here on Jack Zimmermann’s account, like he’s two steps behind what’s really happening.

 

 

-

 

 

Eric goes home, and fixes himself dinner, makes himself tidy the dishes even though he doesn’t really want to. He turns the radio on because his apartment is too quiet. He calls home but his parents don’t answer, and he lays awake for a long, long time.

He can’t make any of it make sense and it’s sitting like a splinter in his finger, but there’s something more. Eric wonders if the most impossible thing he’s seen this week is, in fact, a someone rather than a something. He wonders how you can live like that, carrying around some deep, brilliant tragedy.

Eric’s tragedies are small and simple and he hides them as best he can. He’s never wondered if they mean something larger, if they’re caused by something greater. Until now.

He’s always thought that things were best when they were simple. Until now.

The clock on his bedside table shows the hour, and it’s moving in the way it should, one second after another all in a row. Eric feels like he’s been chasing missing time since he walked through the basement doors, days before he lost nine whole minutes.

He almost isn’t surprised when the phone rings, a little before midnight.

“It’s me,” Jack says. “I haven’t been able to sleep.”

“Chamomile,” Eric says automatically. “And honey. That’s my Moomaw’s remedy, anyway. Tried and true.”

He thinks Jack is going to laugh but he doesn’t. “I talked to the D.A.’s office in Raymond County this afternoon,” Jack says. “There isn’t a case file on Billy Miles. All the paperwork we filed--”

“It’s gone?”

“We need to talk, Bittle.”

“Okay,” Eric says. “Tomorrow.”

There’s silence down the phone line, and Eric thinks he can hear Jack breathing for maybe half a minute until the line clicks and he hangs up. Eric wonders why he isn’t sleeping, if he’s thinking about the case or about what’s going to happen, what it means, or simply what he’s lived through. He can still feel Jack’s lips and nose and chin in his hair. He sets the phone down, looks up and out the window through the curtains. The stars aren’t really visible because of the light pollution and the streetlamps outside, but he thinks he can almost see them anyway.

It’s quiet, and grey, like everything around him is holding it’s breath, like it’s waiting for something to happen. Eric doesn’t know what’s going to happen. For the first time, he feels like he doesn’t mind.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> now that this is done i can tell you that my plan ISNT NOT to just keep rewriting episodes of txf until i get to 'bad blood.' CMON BITTLE GET THOSE LITTLE LEGS MOVING. 
> 
> i know the gunmen aren't in the pilot but i couldn't resist. i could write a whole one-off of the adventures of shitty lardo & johnson, it would be hilarious. i only yanked some of the dialogue out of the pilot & had a hard time with some of it because bitty & scully talk & act in such completely different ways. the bitty in this story is some hybrid bitty-scully creature because the bitty we know would never be studious enough to get himself accepted to the fbi. whatever!!! suspend your disbelief!!! also do you know how hard it is to write him without calling him BITTY???? shits probably gives him that nickname in a bit. 
> 
> i couldn't resist some of the direct lines though-- when else are you going to get the chance to make jack say "that's why they put the i in fbi"???? 
> 
> (that's why they put the bi in fbi. we know jack, we know.)
> 
> alicia & bob z aren't anything at all like the mulder parents, for the record. 
> 
> kp's side of this story is almost even MORE tragic if you can believe it. imagine that you're 17 years old & in love with your best friend & it's great, it's wonderful, but then something strange & unexplained & traumatic happens to you. you just want to put it behind you, get back to the way things were when things made sense, but he can't, he won't, he shoves everything else aside to find answers, you included, & you don't know how to help him or what to do. & then of course you both end up working in d.c. because that's just how life goes. as cait said: "why are you making me feel so emo about alien abductions???????"
> 
> ANYWAY. who's excited for the revival episode next week??? MULDER AND SCULLY MEET THE WERE CREATURE. 
> 
> let me know if you like it!!! shittybknights.tumblr.com


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